Plenary: Closing Reflections

Day 2, 30 November, 4.30pm – 5.10pm

Venue: Level 2, Robert Webster Building, School of the Arts and Media, USNW

Abstract: This closing plenary will provide some informal reflections on themes that emerge from the conference. Anthea Garman’s reflections here.

Speakers:

Poppy de Souza is an Adjunct Research Fellow with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University.  Her work critically engages with the ethics and politics of voice and listening in the context of changing media technologies, everyday cultural production, representational politics and political transformation, with a focus on sites of struggle, resistance and innovation.   Her PhD, ‘Beyond Voice Poverty: new economies of voice and the frontiers of speech, listening and recognition’ (University of Melbourne, 2015) explored this terrain in depth.  More recent work investigates the relationship between sound, listening and racial (in)justice; and sonic/acoustic violence and the ‘white ear’; and listening and media justice (with Tanja Dreher).  Poppy is also an ARC Research Fellow with the University of Melbourne on the Discovery project From Members to Leaders?  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Participation in Political Parties. 

Jessica Feldman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford University Digital Civil Society Lab (2017-2018) and Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Communications at the American University of Paris (Fall 2018 onwards). She earned a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2017. Her dissertation 'Listening Intently: Towards a Critical Media Theory of Ethical Listening' considers how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames political possibilities. She is currently leading a research and book project, 'Democratic Values for Digital Design', which brings together ethnographies of listening practices in social movements with values-in-design analyses on emerging distributed communications technologies, such as mesh networks. Recent publications in International Journal of Communications, Transposition: Music et sciences sociales, and Ear/Wave/Event, as well as edited volumes in English and French.

Anthea Garman is Professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, where she is also Deputy Head of School responsible for Research and Community Engagement. She teaches writing and editing, long form journalism and multimedia storytelling and supervises postgraduate research projects. She is a member of the Andrew W. Mellon-funded research project Media and Sociality which will run from 2018 to 2021 and will use decolonial theory to examine the complex relationships between South Africa’s changing media environment and its changing political environment. She is the author of Antjie Krog and the Postapartheid Public Sphere: Speaking Poetry to Power (UKZN Press, 2015) and the co-editor of Media and Citizenship: Between Marginalisation and Participation (HSRC Press, 2017